5 Creative Uses for Bad Wine

If you’ve committed the sin of allowing wine to go bad, or just opened a bottle that isn’t up to your standards, all is not lost. Instead of letting that red wine go to waste, here are some helpful things you can do with it:

Cook With It

While it might not be a great idea to drink less-than-great wine, it’s completely fine to use it for boiling, braising or other cooking purposes.

Blind taste tests have shown that as long as you’re boiling, braising, or otherwise reducing the liquid, the quality of the wine isn’t so important. So add it to a slow-simmered stew or a from-scratch pasta sauce. Try an on-it’s-way-to-vinegar white for cooking down onions or mushrooms. Don’t worry – no one will be any the wiser.

Make Artisan Red Wine Vinegar

The stuff that you’d make on your own is far superior to the cheap, store-bought stuff. Here’s how you do it:

Use It As Dye

Judging from how difficult red wine stains are to get out of fabric, it makes a pretty darn good intentional fabric dye.

This is a great project for a bottle that’s gone well past its prime, since there’s no ingesting or immersing involved. Wine-dyed fabrics have a lovely “crafty” quality, much the same as the popular tea-dyed look. Try it on linens or comfy cotton, Boho-style garments, and anything else that you want to endow with an earthy, natural vibe.